Middle school construction: John Evans project

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The John Evans Project

In November, voters in District 6 approved a bond issue for $8 million to match a Colorado Department of Education Building Excellent Schools Today grant that will pay for the construction of a new John Evans school. The grant was a competitive grant that the district applied for through CDE’s division of capital construction. It is designed to help districts remodel or replace structures that are becoming unsafe. The grant matches a certain percentage of the project cost based on several criteria set by the state. In District 6’s case, the match was 72 percent. The district will construct a new, 100,000 square-foot school for $8 million; the state will pay the additional $22 million.

From start to finish, board of education members took more than a year developing a game plan for John Evans, taking it to the voters and getting the final go-ahead from the state with a matching grant. It will take another two years for Wayne Eads of District 6 to line up a project manager, an architect, a general contractor and get construction under way. In the end, the school will move six miles west of its current location

John Evans is more than 50 years old and with multiple problems. One room is sealed off and unusable. Other rooms have lights duct-taped to the wall because screws to the masonry would need asbestos abatement. Stairs outside the main bus entrance fill with ice each winter. Tiles are falling from the ceiling. There is no line of sight from the front entrance to the main office. Intercom systems do not work in all the rooms, requiring administrators to personally walk to those rooms in the event of an emergency or drill. It needs a new roof and all new heating and air conditioning, and those are only some of the problems with the building.

The district decided not only to rebuild it, but relocate it as well, to the southwest corner of 37th Street and 65th Avenue in Evans, where the district already owns 50 acres of land and hopes to have a multi-school campus encompassing a PK-20 format, which adds preschool and higher education to the standard kindergarten through 12th grade format.

District officials say the relocation won’t change the boundaries of John Evans but there are some kinks in the plan that still need to be worked out.

Both 37th Street and 65th Avenue are two-lane roads that are highly traveled already with speeds of at least 45 mph in all directions. The intersection is a four-way stop that community members complained during meetings is a bottleneck in the morning as commuters head out of town for work. Adding buses and more vehicles to the intersection would only make it worse, they said. A traffic study should be completed by April 2013.

Also, a more than 100-year-old home that is the former Ashton School House sits on the corner of the land. It is the only portion of the land that the school district does not own. Depending on the design of the school, it could be a problem for the district if the owners, who have declined to talk about their soon-to-be new neighbor, won’t work with the district on a solution.

Eads said he has contacted the owners and told them the district is going forward and will be in contact to let them know of any impacts to their property. Although Eads said the district is not interested in it right now, it does have eminent domain authority if needed. Eminent domain allows governments to take private property for certain reasons with fair market value compensation.

The next step for the district is to form a design advisory group of 15-20 residents who will help decide what the school should look like and what should be included in the “extras.”

“From lighting to how many outlets to put in the girls locker room for hair dryers,” Eads said about the decisions the group will make. “One thing I know, we will have the best middle school around.”